White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

by Robin DiAngelo

The United States was founded on the principle that all people are created equal. Yet the nation began with the attempted genocide of Indigenous people and the theft of their land. American wealth was built on the labor of kidnapped and enslaved Africans and their descendants.

This isn't a book to call out obvious racism.

While implicit bias is always at play because all humans have bias, inequity can occur simply through homogeneity; if I am not aware of the barriers you face, then I won’t see them, much less be motivated to remove them. Nor will I be motivated to remove the barriers if they provide an advantage to which I feel entitled.

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Not naming the groups that face barriers only serves those who already have access; the assumption is that the access enjoyed by the controlling group is universal.

How do you feel people get ahead in our society? What is the best way?

I am mainly writing to a white audience; when I use the terms us and we, I am referring to the white collective.

White people in North America live in a society that is deeply separate and unequal by race, and white people are the beneficiaries of that separation and inequality. As a result, we are insulated from racial stress, at the same time that we come to feel entitled to and deserving of our advantage. Given how seldom we experience racial discomfort in a society we dominate, we haven’t had to build our racial stamina.

What do you think of the term racial stamina? To what is she refering? How is this true with you? Are there times you have felt uncomfratable talking aout race or confronting your racism?

Though white fragility is triggered by discomfort and anxiety, it is born of superiority and entitlement. White fragility is not weakness per se. In fact, it is a powerful means of white racial control and the protection of white advantage.

This is a tough one. What are your initial thoughts or feelings?

I came to see that the way we are taught to define racism makes it virtually impossible for white people to understand it. Given our racial insulation, coupled with misinformation, any suggestion that we are complicit in racism is a kind of unwelcome and insulting shock to the system.

If, however, I understand racism as a system into which I was socialized, I can receive feedback on my problematic racial patterns as a helpful way to support my learning and growth.

We spoke of a while back how implici bias is racism dolled up. What is the difference?

White progressives can be the most difficult for people of color because, to the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived. None of our energy will go into what we need to be doing for the rest of our lives: engaging in ongoing self-awareness, continuing education, relationship building, and actual antiracist practice. White progressives do indeed uphold and perpetrate racism, but our defensiveness and certitude make it virtually impossible to explain to us how we do so.

I am a white American raised in the United States. I have a white frame of reference and a white worldview, and I move through the world with a white experience.

Thoughts? Doesn't everyone view their world through their own subjective lense? How is this any different?

Interrupting the forces of racism is ongoing, lifelong work because the forces conditioning us into racist frameworks are always at play; our learning will never be finished.

How do we do that? How do we continue this lifelong fight?

A significant aspect of the white script derives from our seeing ourselves as both objective and unique.

we have to begin to understand why we cannot fully be either; we must understand the forces of socialization.

Experiments and statistics. I always think I'm outside them.

The racial status quo is comfortable for white people, and we will not move forward in race relations if we remain comfortable.

How do we become uncomforatble? what actions should we take that can make a change?

People who claim not to be prejudiced are demonstrating a profound lack of self-awareness.

When a racial group’s collective prejudice is backed by the power of legal authority and institutional control, it is transformed into racism, a far-reaching system that functions independently from the intentions or self-images of individual actors.

People of color may also hold prejudices and discriminate against white people, but they lack the social and institutional power that transforms their prejudice and discrimination into racism; the impact of their prejudice on whites is temporary and contextual.

All systems of oppression are adaptive; they can withstand and adjust to challenges and still maintain inequality.

How has racism changed?

if we pretend not to notice race, then there can be no racism.

White privelage

One line of King’s speech in particular—that one day he might be judged by the content of his character and not the color of his skin—was seized upon by the white public because the words were seen to provide a simple and immediate solution to racial tensions: pretend that we don’t see race, and racism will end.

Why do you always bring up race? Perfect example of white privelage.

a common response in the name of color blindness is to declare that an individual who says that race matters is the one who is racist. In other words, it is racist to acknowledge race.

Projecting.

I have never felt that my race mattered, so you must feel that yours doesn’t either.

How should race matter?

beliefs. While the idea of color blindness may have started out as a well-intentioned strategy for interrupting racism, in practice it has served to deny the reality of racism and thus hold it in place. Racial bias is largely unconscious, and herein lies the deepest challenge—the defensiveness that ensues upon any suggestion of racial bias.4 This defensiveness is classic white fragility because it protects our racial bias while simultaneously affirming our identities as open-minded.

This defensiveness is rooted in the false but widespread belief that racial discrimination can only be intentional. Our lack of understanding about implicit bias leads to aversive racism.

And racist are always evil, and I'm not evil, so therefore, I'm not racist.

If we grow up in environments with few if any people of color, are we not in fact less sheltered from racist conditioning because we have to rely on narrow and repetitive media representations, jokes, omissions, and warnings for our understanding of people of color? Conversely, positioning white spaces as sheltered and those who are raised in them as racially innocent taps into classic narratives of people of color as not innocent.

When you consider the moral judgment we make about people we deem as racist in our society, the need to deny our own racism—even to ourselves—makes sense.

Looking at it as a life long bias built into us, makes it not a personal failure.

The body of research about children and race demonstrates that white children develop a sense of white superiority as early as preschool.

Virtually all dissenters were subjected to a form of peer pressure in which they were told that it was only a joke and that they should lighten up.

don’t. In some ways, racism’s adaptations over time are more sinister than concrete rules such as Jim Crow.

What do you think she is refering to? Justice system.

People of color lack these benefits because they are racialized within a culture of white supremacy—a culture in which they are seen as inferior, if they are seen at all.

I exude a deeply internalized assumption of racial superiority.

White solidarity is the unspoken agreement among whites to protect white advantage and not cause another white person to feel racial discomfort by confronting them when they say or do something racially problematic.

Many of us can relate to the big family dinner at which Uncle Bob says something racially offensive. Everyone cringes but no one challenges him because nobody wants to ruin the dinner.

Each uninterrupted joke furthers the circulation of racism through the culture, and the ability for the joke to circulate depends on my complicity.

white fragility enabled the white elite to direct the white working class’s resentment toward people of color.

This idea—that racism is not a white problem—enables us to sit back and let people of color take very real risks of invalidation and retaliation as they share their experiences.

“Racism is a systemic, societal, institutional, omnipresent, and epistemologically embedded phenomenon that pervades every vestige of our reality. For most whites, however, racism is like murder: the concept exists, but someone has to commit it in order for it to happen. This limited view of such a multilayered syndrome cultivates the sinister nature of racism and, in fact, perpetuates racist phenomena rather than eradicates them.”2

If, as a white person, I conceptualize racism as a binary and I place myself on the “not racist” side, what further action is required of me? No action is required, because I am not a racist.

racially problematic

diversity: “I know people of color [and/or have been near people of color, and/or have general fond regard for people of color]; therefore, I am free of racism.”

Had I been old enough, I probably would have marched in the 1960s, and yet as far as into the 1990s, I was saying and doing racially problematic things. Although I do them less often and less blatantly today, I still do them.

While everyone of every race holds prejudice and can discriminate against someone of another race, in the US and other white/settler nations, only white people are in the position to oppress people of color collectively and throughout the whole of society.

Most of us alive before and during the 1960s have had images from the civil rights conflicts of that time held up as the epitome of racism. Today we have images of white nationalists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, to hold up. And while speaking up against these explicitly racist actions is critical, we must also be careful not to use them to keep ourselves on the “good” side of a false binary.

Exploring our collective racial identity interrupts a key privilege of dominance—the ability to see oneself only as an individual. We need to discuss white people as a group—even if doing so jars us—in order to disrupt our unracialized identities.

However, I believe that in the white mind, black people are the ultimate racial “other,” and we must grapple with this relationship, for it is a foundational aspect of the racial socialization underlying white fragility.

I have friends who are black and whom I love deeply. I do not have to suppress feelings of hatred and contempt as I sit with them; I see their humanity. But on the macro level, I also recognize the deep anti-black feelings that have been inculcated in me since childhood.

there was no concept of race or a white race before the need to justify the enslavement of Africans.

The early American economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office. The laments about

“black pathology,” the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer. And this destruction did not end with slavery.6

anti-blackness comes from deep guilt about what we have done and continue to do;